Taxibeat secures $4M in Series A, aims to expand globally

Taxibeat, an increasingly popular taxi app available now in 5 cities across the globe, raises 4 million of funding from London-based Hummingbird Ventures. This is the second round of investment for Athens-based company who had secured its first funding of 3 million almost a year ago from private investors and rolled out expansion operations.

Founded by Nick Drandakis in May 2011, Taxibeat will use the fresh money to further accelerate growth in current markets, which include Athens, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City and Sao Paolo, and expand to new markets in South America and Southern Europe.

In an official blogpost, the company announced they will take on the challenge to launch in large and hard-to-manage taxi markets. It added Taxibeat currently serves 40M USD in taxi cab transactions annually, with a montly growing rate of 18 percent over the last year.

Available on both iOS and Android platforms, Taxibeat is another mobile app that enables passengers to locate nearby taxi drivers and hail them. However, it adopts a slightly different approach from the likes such as HailoCab, Easy Taxi and GetTaxi, with its ‘profiling’ approach. It provides the drivers and customers to generate a full profile for their account and personalize their cab hailing based on choices.

The car drivers, for example, can promote their services through providing information on type of cars, spoken languages, user rating as well as extra amenities such as free on-board wifi, , pet-friendliness etc. By providing transparency for both drivers and riders, the blog post reads, Taxibeat aims to revolutionize the taxi market.